A monospace font beauty pageant

I got a note the other day from Sam Block about the Tamsyn font, which is a beautiful little arrangement in a nice array of small point sizes.

Tamsyn’s only shortcoming, and one that Sam pointed out, is that it lacks a lot of the line drawing characters that make things like mc fun to look at. Without them … it’s interesting, to say the least.

Looking at that brings up a couple of other fonts that should get attention. Here’s erusfont, which only has two sizes in Arch but is remarkably clear, even at the smallest.

Personally, I’m a strict Terminus fan.

That, to me, is perfect. Of course, the hard part about fonts is that these days, most are intended for use on a graphical desktop. So short of converting them (somehow), most are trapped under Xorg.

For example, here’s Dina.

Very clean and upright. Dina is cute, but I can’t seem to find a font file that will open in a pure framebuffer terminal session. Of course, there are ways around that.

Here’s another one: GohuFont.

Also clean and straight. This next one is ugly as sin to me: FixedSys.

I don’t see the appeal there, unless I’m looking for something as homage to first-generation MacIntoshes. Here’s Monte Carlo though, which is quite nice.

I could learn to love that. This last one comes in about a thousand different flavors and arrangements: Proggy.

That’s just one of the several thousand that you get in Arch when you ask for the one. It’s like a free buffet.

There are some other fonts that are interesting, if you’re working in a text-only arrangement. Inconsolata is quite attractive, the downside for me being the fact that it seems to be unworkable in a terminal. And I get some smearing here and there.

But I think I’ll stick with Terminus for now. If Tamsyn picks up line-drawing characters I might jump ship, but for now this is the best for me.

Retro without a cause: PC as a diary

I have been thinking about something lately that I can’t quite form into a cohesive shape … so it might be a completely ridiculous idea that’s a perfect waste of time. If it is, ignore this.

I’ve repeated in the past that blogging is essentially keeping a public diary, which is such a contradiction in terms as to be completely nonsensical. I haven’t changed my mind about that.

This comment set something loose though. It’s true: If you wanted to keep a blog for your own purposes, as an electronic diary, perhaps in a closet somewhere, an old machine might be a viable candidate.

And if I stretch my imagination, this also seems like a possibility for a business, as a kind of electronic logbook. Events that take place over a work day or shift can be added and reviewed in sequence.

From that direction, I guess a blog isn’t an insincere, worthless, pitiful excuse for social contact. It might actually have a function.

A few things come to mind when this rolls around in my head … apart from what was mentioned in that comment. …

• Assuming this little project would have to serve a web page of some sort, nginx would be a great option. Wicked fast and ultra light.
• nanoblogger also comes to mind, although I have little experience with it and it might not be practical. You’re on your own there.
• So long as I mention nanoblogger, I have to mention charm. You could do a lot worse than a terminal-based python script to work the gears.
• But what also might be useful, is that one-line page server in python. I see that bounce around the Internet a lot, and I don’t know how much more lightweight than that you can get.

Beyond that though, it really becomes a question of balance, between hardware and software. Something like this curmudgeonly 700Mhz Celeron would be ideal, since it has such unfriendly hardware as to be a royal inconvenience … for anything but running terminal services.

Like I said, it’s not a fully fledged idea, just a collection of similar points. The connecting principles are there and the core software is available.

This time it’s really just that the overarching purpose needs to be defined. Right?

Ubuntu 8.04.4 to 9.10 Desktop i386 USB images

I don’t use vanilla Ubuntu much any more. It generally requires more powerful hardware than I am willing to provide, and is generally headed in a direction I don’t want to go.

It is occasionally useful though, as a live environment in certain situations. It’s rare, but it’s true. I sometimes fall back on it.

In most situations though, all I want is a way to quickly boot into the live environment from a USB stick, and discard it when I’m done.

So ideally, a live environment that I can boot straightaway would be ideal. For example, the Arch Linux ISO just needs written straight to a drive with dd, and it will boot perfectly.

Ubuntu ISOs won’t do that. From the live environment there is a way to create a bootable USB disk, but to do that I’d need to install Ubuntu or boot the live environment from CD.

And that’s more or less what I’m trying to avoid. I don’t want to burn a CD, or install it … just dd, boot and be done.

So that’s why for the past year or so I’ve put up plain-jane USB sticks written from live Ubuntu runs. These are identical to the results you’d get if you used that same tool yourself, and wrote it to a 1Gb stick.

With these, you can download the file, write it straight to a device with

dd if=ubuntu-x.xx-desktop-i386.img of=/dev/sdXY

where X and Y are your drive assignment labels, and reboot. You don’t need to install Ubuntu, or burn a CD of it, or rely on a third party tool like unetbootin (which is awesome stuff, by the way).

Just for fun, and because I wanted to, and because it’s a free world, and because I wanted them, I made images in the same style for Ubuntu 8.04.4, Ubuntu 8.10, Ubuntu 9.04 and Ubuntu 9.10. The image for 10.04 is here, and for 10.10 is here.

These have all been tested in the same style, and worked fine for me. Just for the record, they were all made with the creator’s option to discard files on shutdown, rather than allocate space for saving.

So there you are. Enjoy.

P.S.: I have rotten luck working with LinuxTracker. If for some reason you can download the torrent but see no traffic, leave me a note and I’ll try again in the morning.

Adding the modification time to the beginning of a file name

Today’s oddball chore was to try to rename a long series of files, all in one directory, with their modification date at the front of the name.

What I wanted was something like this, where the date is first, the hostname of the machine is second, and the last part of the name is the original file name.

I don’t have much of a rationale, but I used stat for this. ls will also spit out a nicely formatted list that has the date formatted properly.

However, I ran into problems with that and with cut, where the size of the file was shifting the location of the date from side to side.

Either way, here’s what I came up with:

for i in * ; do MODDATE=`stat -c "%y" "${i}" | cut -c-10` ; mv "$i" "$MODDATE $i" ; done

That should change, as an example, IMG_1346.JPG with a modification date of 2009-05-22, to “2009-05-22 IMG_1346.JPG” … hopefully.

If there’s an easier or cleaner way to do it, short of installing a renaming tool , please let me know.

Who knew it was that easy?

I got to be a hero yesterday, for something that I’m not particularly proud of: Recovering a lost password in Windows XP.

I’d tell you the context but you wouldn’t believe it anyway. Suffice to say that this isn’t the first time I’ve had to find a password for this particular person.

The revelation for me though, was how frighteningly easy it was to get passwords for the entire system, and how quickly it was finished.

I used Ophcrack in its low-ram version, which runs with Slitaz (yay Slitaz!) as its foundation. There are other versions on the same ISO though.

With this machine and the host system mounted as an external drive, it scrounged all the passwords for every account — including accounts the owner didn’t even know about — in about a minute and a half.

I am amazed, dismayed and chagrined, all at once.

I am not a security person. Security and passwords and encryption and things like that are just not interesting. I know, I should be more security-minded, but it’s all very ho-hum to me.

At the same time I am reminded of something I was told a long, long time ago … that if the physical security of a computer is compromised, all bets are off.

For me, yesterday was a good example of that.

The worst best torrent client list

I had another one of those proverbial coffee-spitting moments this morning when I got a link to PC Magazine’s list of the best torrent clients for 2011.

Setting aside the fact that 2011 is all of about 25 days old, which makes it tough to pick out the best of the year, the four listed — BitTorrent, Deluge, uTorrent and Vuze — are hardly representative of what’s available.

And the fact that Vuze somehow gets a little yellow and red “EC” as some sort of award as editor’s choice … well, that’s just horrific.

It’s like reviewing four of the best cars available for 2011, and picking a Hummer as the top model. It defies all logic.

But who knows? Me and my rack of outdated computers don’t really understand — and don’t really want to understand — what passes for popular technology in 2011. I’ve been down this road before.

If Joe Shmoe with zero computer knowledge wants to download a movie or something, then maybe point-and-click Vuze, with its plethora of unrelated options (free trial DVD burning! gasp! ) is the answer for him. I won’t argue the point.

Somehow its sad though, that PC Magazine could only come up with four torrent clients, and picked quite possibly the worst of the lot to highlight and endorse. Stop me before I cringe again.

P.S.: No, I don’t actually drink coffee. Blech.

It never rains, but it pours

It figures. Only days after I am effectively overwhelmed with leftover computers, and after I get them all arranged in some semblance of order, and after I worry about what will happen next … the unbelievable occurs.

Quite nonchalantly and without so much as a by-your-leave, my boss says yesterday, “No one is using that old grey computer. You should take it home.”

Grumble, grumble, grumble.

Two years of surreptitiously using it as a Linux test bed, another year of shelf life, and out of the blue it’s suddenly mine to work with. I need a smiley that smacks itself on the head in disbelief.

Oh well. There’s naught so queer as folk.

So there it is. The Thing That Wouldn’t Leave is back, and it looks like it’s for good this time.

Another mixed blessing, it seems. What in the world am I going to do with this one … ?

Adjusting an mplayer flag

Only a short note this morning: An update to mplayer yesterday broke the configuration I posted a couple of weeks ago.

At the time I pointed out that vf="scale=1024:-2" worked but I wasn’t sure why. It seemed to naturally push the vertical dimension of the image down without distorting it.

That’s not the case now. Apparently mplayer is trying to push the image beyond the dimensions of the screen, if I understand its error messages correctly.

So I’m specifying the dimensions explicitly, which is a little inconvenient but takes only a second or two to figure out. If I can find a better way to do it, I’ll make a note of it here.

Bring out the rack!

A couple more photos, just to see if I can make my fellow geeks jealous.

 

I am nearing critical mass in terms of the number of homeless computers I’ve taken in. This wheeled shelf and a rather pricey six-slot power strip seem to keep things organized though.

My wiring and strapping isn’t the best, but I wanted something I could keep organized and still pull apart at a moment’s notice.

Clockwise from upper left, the big dog of the rack, the 2.5Ghz Celeron, which is the media center for the house. Right now the palmrests are the only places those speakers will really fit.

Next to it is the scallywag 700Mhz Celeron, which looks a little better after a cleaning.

One odd thing about this machine, if you look close, is that the speakers are actually mounted on the hinge. It means the lid doesn’t block the sound when it’s closed. Ironic, therefore, that they sound awful.

Below that is the Pentium — the torrent slave and in-house nfs server. That’s what I use to pass stuff between machines, and is also where I keep my collection of ripped DVDs.

Finally, at lower left is the Mebius, which is really just resting there after being a surrogate two or three times over the past week or so.

Oddly enough, it was just as useful (although dreadfully slow) to install Debian for the Celeron on that machine, as it was to install it for the 120Mhz Pentium I’m using now. Of course, that means the Celeron is running i486 Debian. …

Altogether, my desk is pleasantly free of junk right now.

A clean desk is the sign of a disturbed mind.

Of course, if things get any more dense in here I’m going to need to free up that bottom rack, and trap some computers there. That, however, could trigger the herd to panic. …

Not a new idea, not a bad idea

Pop quiz! What’s wrong with this picture?

Answer: There’s nothing wrong with it. Except that there isn’t anything running but htop and a few instances of ssh, plus the screenshot program and Debian’s underlying structure.

So what’s the point? The point is, on another tty I am typing this post. In other words, one of those tty sessions is running my regular system remotely, and this machine is just the intermediary.

That’s right: It’s a dumb terminal now. Welcome to 1978.

Innovative? No. Awe-inspiring? No. New and improved? No and no.

So what’s the point? Well, having that beat-up Toshiba Dynabook in the house has given me the chance to try a little something I mentioned a very long time ago, but haven’t really done.

There’s nothing that I do on a day-to-day basis that a much faster, much more powerful computer couldn’t do as a side gig while it handles something else.

All that’s needed to mesh the two is a simple network connection and an instance of ssh. So when the Toshiba arrived and proved unaccommodating in all the important areas (like keyboard and screen ) I decided to give this a try.

Basically, I just mimicked the Debian installation on the Toshiba, then rsync’d the entire home directory from the Pentium to the Celeron.

I set up dropbear and got a wireless connection working, and now I’m done.

So what good is it? Let me start with the bad things, if you don’t mind.

First, I lose any practical access to the framebuffer on the Pentium, just because the system isn’t meant to work that way. So things like fim or fbv or fbi are not going to happen.

That’s either a good thing or a bad thing, depending on your perspective. I don’t miss it personally, but if you rely on something like the graphical version of links, that might be important.

Second, like the highly touted yet ever farcical cloud computing trend, you do need a functional network to do this. And that means your files aren’t local, unless you take the time to back them up over the network at some point.

In-house, that doesn’t bother me, but otherwise I wouldn’t really dig it.

And yes, I suppose this does increase the power consumption. So all you wannabe greenies out there who scold me on a regular basis via e-mail for not dumping my collection in a landfill can harass me about how I’m actually drawing 100W now, as opposed to 40W regularly. Shame on me.

On the plus side however, there are quite a few points of interest.

First, this places all the workload on the machine with the actual power in it. All the Pentium does is relay what is happening on the other side of the room.

And so I’m effectively taking advantage of their strong points. The 700Mhz Celeron can handle the grunting and grinding of actually saving and loading and writing and accessing.

And the Pentium, which has a lovely keyboard and proper framebuffer support, can show the action in glorious 800×600, with no impediment. Even if it lacks the processor wherewithal, comparatively.

In fact, as you can see in that picture, system demands are at an all-time low. Even Debian, which has a much higher memory profile than ConnochaetOS or my custom Crux systems, needs only 10Mb to keep itself happy.

And that means, to me, that there is the potential here to drop even lower on the scale of usability. Get out your 486: If you can connect it to your network and get a decent screen going, you can probably use it as a dumb terminal for your bigger one.

And I get the luxury of hardware the Pentium just doesn’t have, or can’t do because of this that or the other. I can run moc on the Celeron and control it from the Pentium, much like I did with mplayer here.

And I have USB ports that I can directly access, as well as a CDROM now. True, it’s not quite the same as actually having them on-board, on this machine, but the idea is there.

And although it’s a rarity, I could call this a sort of security measure, as a safer place to store data. Well, that’s what the cloud computer proponents say, anyway.

I don’t think I’ll keep this arrangement for long, but I will keep my eye open for very old, very low-end machines now, that I might use in this same capacity, just for fun.

And if I can get my hands on one of those ancient Librettos, I’ll be a true Internet hero.